Because if somebody else invents better drugs to give away for free, you're sunk. You're right, except for the tiny fact that companies that produce generic drugs don't invent anything, they simply copy. If the big evil pharmas didn't do the R&D, the saintly companies producing the generics wouldn't have a product either (unless they do thier own R&D, in which case they would have extra costs to recoup which would reflect in the price of the product, which would make them the same as the big evil pharmas).
Admittedly plain greed also comes into it as a significant factor in the pricing of drugs.
It's also a bad analogy - the R&D costs involved in software are insignificant in comparison to those involved in drugs.
I'd imagine that they're talking about between idle and 100% - it's more like saying a car will do 20MPG in gridlock and 52MPH on an open highway, which are usefull figures to know.
Any technical reason they can't do the same with laptops? Give it a single reinforced hinge that acts like a normal LCD stand - may be a bit bulky, but you could open your laptop up and raise your screen along the hinge, tilt it back or forwards and even rotate if needed.
Granted, you'd have a tiny market (people who don't mind unsightly bulges down the middle of thier laptop an who actually want a rotating/tilting screen on a laptop).
If there was a way for me to legally watch my favourite TV shows within a reasonable time of the episodes first airing I wouldn't have a use for BitTorrent at all. As it is, I'm not willing to wait the 6 months (or never) it takes the local broadcaster(s) to pick up a TV show (And since I'm still paying my TV licence and satelite TV subscription anyway, I'm not seeing the victim here. Unless you count the advertisements that I ignore anyway).
I prefer my books is paper format, my software as originals and my movies on the big screen with friends. Pardon me if I'm not losing any sleep at night.
I'm talking about unsolicited emails from addresses and domains you've never heard of before. You could also try clarifying points before accusing people of missing them. You may enjoy the challenge of debating or discussing a moving target, I don't.
How do people know they're in your whitelist so that they don't waste credits (or waste time generating credits)? How do you stop people from simply spoofing the effort? How do you know if the person you're sending an email to is even using your effort based filter? How do you validate that the person sending the email actually put in the effort that they claim? If you're not using a single centralised source such as F@H, how do you make sure that the sender and the recipient are using the same metric (I'm running Seti for my credit, you're filtering on F@H - what then)?
You're obviously unable to follow a thread (and I have a number of family members with anaphylactic allergies, so you can shove you assumptions somewhere else).
If a child is so allergic to peanuts that merely smelling them on someone's breath is enough to trigger thier allergy, then banning the sale of peanuts in a common area is not going to achieve anything. Even if you banned the sale or consumption of peanuts in your common area - how do you propose to keep people away from the child that have consumed peanuts recently outside of your common area? You can keep a child away from other people, but good luck keeping people away from the child when the child is in a public area.
If you can't get a child with that severity of allergy to put on a mask when venturing out into an area accessible to the general public, how the hell do you expect to force every single person that child may ever come into contact with to make 100% sure they haven't eaten peanuts within the last few hours?
Ban and eradicate peanuts? Lock the child away? I eagerly await your magical solution that solves such a child's problem without going to either of these extremes...
Sorry for the double reply, but I forgot the most obvious flaw - what if F@H is offline and you have to work units to process? (And you can be certain that any service that performed the same function as you proposed would be target numero uno for any number of malicious attacks).
I know for Seti@Home there were regular occurences where thier servers did not return any work units - don't know if F@H has the same problem.
At the end of the day you're still going to end up filtering email based on addresses/domains.
If a family member fires off a 3 second email asking you to pick them up at the airport in 3 hours, do you ignore them?
Do you ignore the email from your boss saying "Team meeting at 3pm"?
Should I filter out emails sent by one of servers that tells me it's experiencing a fault? It wouldn't even have time to get a F@H process started before the email was done and dusted.
What about any number of organisations that send out automated emails? Reminders, newsletters and other email that you've subscribed to receive but that takes thier servers a fraction of a second to generate?
What about single emails sent out in bulk (bcc?) If I want to email everyone in my team do I need to put in 15 times the effort of a single mail? Or can I apply a single credit - and if so, what stops a spammer from doing the same?
Your original proposal is still stupid, even if the general idea of requiring some effort is not.
Yes, spam makes up a very large portion of all email sent. Spammers, on the other hand, do not - your idea is to inconvenience the many to discourage the few.
Personally, I'd rather whitelist the email addresses of people and domains I trust (family, friends, work), black list any I know are spam and grey list everything else so that I can scan through it when I have time. Confusing effort with urgency/importancy makes no sense.
Now a company with support capacity and marketing abilities is needed if we want to see more than a 2% market share Amen. It boggles the mind how most proponents of linux on the desktop seem to expect that the vast unwashed masses are supposed to automagically just know about and switch to linux. Are they supposes to guess that it exists? If I had a penny for every ad/plug/promo I've ever seen for a linux distro outside of tech oriented sites... I'd still be damn poor.
And if you want Joe Average to switch the most critical piece of software on thier system, you better damn well give them a phone number to yell at if something goes wrong. Joe Average does not want DIY find-it-yourself fixes as thier first option when things go south.
So if you advertised kiddy porn, and they ordered a copy, and you're stupid enough to snail-mail it to them - how are they violating your rights? (Other than your right to be both criminal and stupid).
Since you obviously didn't read TFA, this is exactly what they are doing. Instead of ordering it, they're logging into the P2P/BitTirrent networks and selecting suspicious files to download (Oh noes! Someone is downloading a file I'm sharing! I feel violated!)
I'm pretty sure if you snail mailed them a video of your dog raping your daughter they'd try and track you down too. And I wouldn't expect the peasants and pitchforks to be too friendly to your cause.
Based on Waters' statements to the committee, the system appears to work like this: Investigators log onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as any other person would and search for files containing certain keywords that are likely to indicate child pornography is involved. Then they download the files--frequently videos, sometimes as long as 20 to 30 minutes, with names like "children kiddy underage illegal.mpg" and much more obscene--to their own machines. They're able to use the Fairplay software to obtain the IP address of the file's sender and, in some cases, display its geographic location in map form.
It's fairly obvious that most of the poeple posting comments here didn't bother to RTFA, or read as far as "Senator" and "P2P" and just assumed the rest. Those that didn't, and still decided that this is a privacy issue (or decide to RickRoll any such system)need thier heads checked.
This is not about monitoring P2P/Bittorrent traffic since all they're doing is logging on the same as any other user. This is not about going after people that download the material, but about going after the people that distribute it. If you "accidentally" download a video of a hillbilly and his 9 year old daughter and then decide to share it, you deserve no sympathy.
This is not the Senator's brainchild - he didn't write the software system being used, so just because he doesn't understand the technobabble involved doesn't automatically mean the system must be junk (After all, tracking a file back to its source isn't that hard, even if verifying it may be).
He also quite plainly states that: A) They're not going after P2P as a technology - bad car analogy and all (actually, for the many proponents of ISP's being "common carriers" it's a pretty good analogy). B) They are aware that the person they identify may not actually be the culprit (ie: spoofing, open wireless etc).
I'm also not sure why slashdotville has also decided that anyone involved in distributing the material in question must by default be savvy enough to take the required measures to avoid being tracked. Yeah, and all drug dealers are criminal masterminds...
Unlike RIAA cases, this is criminal. Which means a much greater burden of proof. Which means when the FBI rock up at your door with a warrant to search your PC you'd better be damned sure you haven't got anything incriminating to be found. "I wasn't sharing!" and "That's not my IP address!" isn't going to cut it as a defence when they find the stuff on your system.
Granted, a few seconds of processing time would be trivial for senders of single emails and a major hassle for a spammer who is trying to push out huge volumes (What about people/sites that send legitimate bulk emails, such as newsletters to subscribers?)
But the suggestion here involves somewhat more than a few seconds (up to days!) of CPU time...
You want to filter your email based on how much people are willing to pay for the extra CPU usage required to process a F@H work unit?
You would also be filtering your email based on how much processing power they have available? (My gaming rig can knock off about 8 work units in the time it takes my older rig to do 1, and my work PC would take twice as long again).
And heaven forbid that someone who actually USES thier computer try and send you an important/urgent email. After all, the more processing cycles they use on anything other than F@H means less cycles sitting around for F@H to use, which means slower processing of work units.
If someone really wants your attention, they'll process for a day or two "Hmm, I have this really important document that I need you to read and sign off on, and I need it done asap. I'll just sit here processing F@H for couple of days then..."
I could probably think of a few more reasons why this is stupid, but if you don't get the drift by now...
It doesn't matter how 'ready for the masses' any product is if it's not being marketed to the masses.
Linux is and will remain an enthusiast/power user OS until someone, somewhere makes an active effort to market it to the masses (and no, word of mouth simply isn't going to cut it). The only active marketing I've ever seen is at a server level to businesses.
Or do we expect the masses to automagically know about linux?
Why does it have to scale out indefinitely?
Or is there some requirement that any alternative energy source must meet 100% of demand to be viable?
And why does this need to be centralised or use otherwise open land? I'm not that enamoured of my roof that I'd begrudge having some of it covered by panels.
Come up with a storage method that is small enough to fit into a small shed and efficient enough to store enough power to meet my needs overnight and I'd be largely off the grid.
I'm not arguing that there is no risk, and I can certainly agree that international enforcement of trademarks and patent is difficult verging on the impossible.
What I was taking exception to was the sentiment expressed in the parent post, specifically in the sentence quoted. Just because a company can replicate another company's product does not mean that they should be allowed, or even worse, encouraged to do so.
The design and manufacturing knowledge to build them is out there, shouldn't anyone be able to replicate the boards? On the point of copied products (not stolen/diverted goods):
And when the company that spent money obtaining the design and manufacturing knowledge (ie: R&D) goes under because they couldn't compete with the barely above cost copies? The company that invests in designing the next generation of a product is gone, and the company that's producing the cheap knockoffs doesn't do design, so where do the next set of improvements come from?
Expecting a company to simply write off its design costs and compete purely on production costs is unworkable.
I know here in slashdotville anything related to IP is treated with scorn, but despite the undeniable increases in abuse IP does serve a valuable purpose when applied correctly.
In their eyes, they are trying to eliminate exploiting players in hopes of making the game better for non-exploiting players Or they could eliminate exploiting players by, I dunno, fixing the exploit? But that's just crazy talk!
The code isn't open source, so releasing detailed descriptions of what security holes exist would only allow them to be exploited easier. Is that what he wants? Probably. Make the holes visible enough for anyone to use and they'll either have to fix the hole, allow people to exploit it or lose customers (either through banning or being unwilling to play with increasing numbers of cheaters).
I am also a developer, and I agree with you on most points.
Unfortunately I've also seen too many cases where our first and second line support escalate issues without actually doing anything first.
I've personally seen cases where on site technicians would argue for days that a perticular problem must be caused by our software, even though we've checked, double checked and triple checked everything we can. When that same technician then admits that he has not actually been on site because he doesn't like the area or the drive is too long is when I've seen people explode. I'd also be seriously pissed if someone wasted several hours of my time purely out of sloth.
Slashdot Mirror
Please tell me that English is not your first language.
Because if somebody else invents better drugs to give away for free, you're sunk. You're right, except for the tiny fact that companies that produce generic drugs don't invent anything, they simply copy. If the big evil pharmas didn't do the R&D, the saintly companies producing the generics wouldn't have a product either (unless they do thier own R&D, in which case they would have extra costs to recoup which would reflect in the price of the product, which would make them the same as the big evil pharmas).
Admittedly plain greed also comes into it as a significant factor in the pricing of drugs.
It's also a bad analogy - the R&D costs involved in software are insignificant in comparison to those involved in drugs.
So c and c++ will die when we figure out how to get data to travel (much) faster than light? I won't be holding my breath.
I'd imagine that they're talking about between idle and 100% - it's more like saying a car will do 20MPG in gridlock and 52MPH on an open highway, which are usefull figures to know.
Any technical reason they can't do the same with laptops? Give it a single reinforced hinge that acts like a normal LCD stand - may be a bit bulky, but you could open your laptop up and raise your screen along the hinge, tilt it back or forwards and even rotate if needed.
Granted, you'd have a tiny market (people who don't mind unsightly bulges down the middle of thier laptop an who actually want a rotating/tilting screen on a laptop).
If there was a way for me to legally watch my favourite TV shows within a reasonable time of the episodes first airing I wouldn't have a use for BitTorrent at all. As it is, I'm not willing to wait the 6 months (or never) it takes the local broadcaster(s) to pick up a TV show (And since I'm still paying my TV licence and satelite TV subscription anyway, I'm not seeing the victim here. Unless you count the advertisements that I ignore anyway).
I prefer my books is paper format, my software as originals and my movies on the big screen with friends. Pardon me if I'm not losing any sleep at night.
How do people know they're in your whitelist so that they don't waste credits (or waste time generating credits)? How do you stop people from simply spoofing the effort? How do you know if the person you're sending an email to is even using your effort based filter? How do you validate that the person sending the email actually put in the effort that they claim? If you're not using a single centralised source such as F@H, how do you make sure that the sender and the recipient are using the same metric (I'm running Seti for my credit, you're filtering on F@H - what then)?
You're obviously unable to follow a thread (and I have a number of family members with anaphylactic allergies, so you can shove you assumptions somewhere else).
If a child is so allergic to peanuts that merely smelling them on someone's breath is enough to trigger thier allergy, then banning the sale of peanuts in a common area is not going to achieve anything. Even if you banned the sale or consumption of peanuts in your common area - how do you propose to keep people away from the child that have consumed peanuts recently outside of your common area? You can keep a child away from other people, but good luck keeping people away from the child when the child is in a public area.
If you can't get a child with that severity of allergy to put on a mask when venturing out into an area accessible to the general public, how the hell do you expect to force every single person that child may ever come into contact with to make 100% sure they haven't eaten peanuts within the last few hours?
Ban and eradicate peanuts? Lock the child away? I eagerly await your magical solution that solves such a child's problem without going to either of these extremes...
Sorry for the double reply, but I forgot the most obvious flaw - what if F@H is offline and you have to work units to process? (And you can be certain that any service that performed the same function as you proposed would be target numero uno for any number of malicious attacks).
I know for Seti@Home there were regular occurences where thier servers did not return any work units - don't know if F@H has the same problem.
At the end of the day you're still going to end up filtering email based on addresses/domains.
If a family member fires off a 3 second email asking you to pick them up at the airport in 3 hours, do you ignore them?
Do you ignore the email from your boss saying "Team meeting at 3pm"?
Should I filter out emails sent by one of servers that tells me it's experiencing a fault? It wouldn't even have time to get a F@H process started before the email was done and dusted.
What about any number of organisations that send out automated emails? Reminders, newsletters and other email that you've subscribed to receive but that takes thier servers a fraction of a second to generate?
What about single emails sent out in bulk (bcc?) If I want to email everyone in my team do I need to put in 15 times the effort of a single mail? Or can I apply a single credit - and if so, what stops a spammer from doing the same?
Your original proposal is still stupid, even if the general idea of requiring some effort is not.
Yes, spam makes up a very large portion of all email sent. Spammers, on the other hand, do not - your idea is to inconvenience the many to discourage the few.
Personally, I'd rather whitelist the email addresses of people and domains I trust (family, friends, work), black list any I know are spam and grey list everything else so that I can scan through it when I have time. Confusing effort with urgency/importancy makes no sense.
If someone is that allergic, wear a damn mask. Was that so hard to think of?
And if you want Joe Average to switch the most critical piece of software on thier system, you better damn well give them a phone number to yell at if something goes wrong. Joe Average does not want DIY find-it-yourself fixes as thier first option when things go south.
I would also use one of the last 3 ISO's I downloaded of Ubuntu RIGHT NOW if it wouldn't be such a pain to get most of my games running on it.
So if you advertised kiddy porn, and they ordered a copy, and you're stupid enough to snail-mail it to them - how are they violating your rights? (Other than your right to be both criminal and stupid).
Since you obviously didn't read TFA, this is exactly what they are doing. Instead of ordering it, they're logging into the P2P/BitTirrent networks and selecting suspicious files to download (Oh noes! Someone is downloading a file I'm sharing! I feel violated!)
I'm pretty sure if you snail mailed them a video of your dog raping your daughter they'd try and track you down too. And I wouldn't expect the peasants and pitchforks to be too friendly to your cause.
It's fairly obvious that most of the poeple posting comments here didn't bother to RTFA, or read as far as "Senator" and "P2P" and just assumed the rest. Those that didn't, and still decided that this is a privacy issue (or decide to RickRoll any such system)need thier heads checked.
This is not about monitoring P2P/Bittorrent traffic since all they're doing is logging on the same as any other user. This is not about going after people that download the material, but about going after the people that distribute it. If you "accidentally" download a video of a hillbilly and his 9 year old daughter and then decide to share it, you deserve no sympathy.
This is not the Senator's brainchild - he didn't write the software system being used, so just because he doesn't understand the technobabble involved doesn't automatically mean the system must be junk (After all, tracking a file back to its source isn't that hard, even if verifying it may be).
He also quite plainly states that:
A) They're not going after P2P as a technology - bad car analogy and all (actually, for the many proponents of ISP's being "common carriers" it's a pretty good analogy).
B) They are aware that the person they identify may not actually be the culprit (ie: spoofing, open wireless etc).
I'm also not sure why slashdotville has also decided that anyone involved in distributing the material in question must by default be savvy enough to take the required measures to avoid being tracked. Yeah, and all drug dealers are criminal masterminds...
Unlike RIAA cases, this is criminal. Which means a much greater burden of proof. Which means when the FBI rock up at your door with a warrant to search your PC you'd better be damned sure you haven't got anything incriminating to be found. "I wasn't sharing!" and "That's not my IP address!" isn't going to cut it as a defence when they find the stuff on your system.
Granted, a few seconds of processing time would be trivial for senders of single emails and a major hassle for a spammer who is trying to push out huge volumes (What about people/sites that send legitimate bulk emails, such as newsletters to subscribers?)
But the suggestion here involves somewhat more than a few seconds (up to days!) of CPU time...
You would also be filtering your email based on how much processing power they have available? (My gaming rig can knock off about 8 work units in the time it takes my older rig to do 1, and my work PC would take twice as long again).
And heaven forbid that someone who actually USES thier computer try and send you an important/urgent email. After all, the more processing cycles they use on anything other than F@H means less cycles sitting around for F@H to use, which means slower processing of work units. If someone really wants your attention, they'll process for a day or two "Hmm, I have this really important document that I need you to read and sign off on, and I need it done asap. I'll just sit here processing F@H for couple of days then..."
I could probably think of a few more reasons why this is stupid, but if you don't get the drift by now...
It doesn't matter how 'ready for the masses' any product is if it's not being marketed to the masses.
Linux is and will remain an enthusiast/power user OS until someone, somewhere makes an active effort to market it to the masses (and no, word of mouth simply isn't going to cut it). The only active marketing I've ever seen is at a server level to businesses.
Or do we expect the masses to automagically know about linux?
Why does it have to scale out indefinitely? Or is there some requirement that any alternative energy source must meet 100% of demand to be viable? And why does this need to be centralised or use otherwise open land? I'm not that enamoured of my roof that I'd begrudge having some of it covered by panels. Come up with a storage method that is small enough to fit into a small shed and efficient enough to store enough power to meet my needs overnight and I'd be largely off the grid.
I'm not arguing that there is no risk, and I can certainly agree that international enforcement of trademarks and patent is difficult verging on the impossible. What I was taking exception to was the sentiment expressed in the parent post, specifically in the sentence quoted. Just because a company can replicate another company's product does not mean that they should be allowed, or even worse, encouraged to do so.
And when the company that spent money obtaining the design and manufacturing knowledge (ie: R&D) goes under because they couldn't compete with the barely above cost copies? The company that invests in designing the next generation of a product is gone, and the company that's producing the cheap knockoffs doesn't do design, so where do the next set of improvements come from?
Expecting a company to simply write off its design costs and compete purely on production costs is unworkable.
I know here in slashdotville anything related to IP is treated with scorn, but despite the undeniable increases in abuse IP does serve a valuable purpose when applied correctly.
My grandparents have also been around a long time - doesn't mean I can't take their senile ramblings with a pinch of salt...
I am also a developer, and I agree with you on most points.
Unfortunately I've also seen too many cases where our first and second line support escalate issues without actually doing anything first.
I've personally seen cases where on site technicians would argue for days that a perticular problem must be caused by our software, even though we've checked, double checked and triple checked everything we can. When that same technician then admits that he has not actually been on site because he doesn't like the area or the drive is too long is when I've seen people explode. I'd also be seriously pissed if someone wasted several hours of my time purely out of sloth.